Tesco is to sell, Blinkbox Music, to Australian online music service, Guvera. Tesco purchased the service from We7 in 2012 for £12 million. Although details have not been announced, Blinkbox Music is expected to be worth less than the Blinkbox Movies sale to Talk Talk, valued at £5 million.

Scrutiny of China’s online streaming portals has increased, resulting in new censorship measures for major US TV series. The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT), has published a notice demanding that online video providers submit complete seasons of foreign shows with Chinese subtitles to the censorship board before they go on air. Affected are such providers as Tencent, Alibaba, Youku Tudou, Baidu's iQiyi and Sohu.

French media group Vivendi has bid to take control of online video site Dailymotion. The conglomerate, which owns pay TV operator Canal + and Universal Music Group, has offered current owner Orange €217m ($288m) for 80% of the company.

Retailer and online video service Amazon will finance up to 12 US theatrical movies in 2015, releasing them on its Prime Instant Video subscription service one to two months after the cinema. The move into film production and distribution follows the commission of the first episodic series directed by Woody Allen, which will also be exclusive to Prime Instant Video.
Content produced and distributed through Amazon Original Movies will move quickly from cinemas to subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) - four to eight weeks instead of the usual six to ten months.

This year, UK public broadcaster the BBC will release its largest slate of online originals to date. From January, online service iPlayer will show 16 programmes of both long and short form. Programming planned for release are both scripted and unscripted, including comedies, dramas, and documentary. The first, available for the first time yesterday on iPlayer, is long-form documentary Bitter Lake.

Two weeks since taking The Interview to online platforms in the US, Sony reported over $31 million in consumer revenues from its digital distribution (over 4.3m downloads) and $5m in cinema distribution.

German music industry association, BVMI, and chart compiler GFK announced preliminary 2014 year-end results for the German music market. The overall market was valued around €1.48 billion, up 1.8% from 2013.

Dish announced its pay TV OTT service targeted at millennials, Sling TV, which will be made available in Q1 2015 for $20 a month on internet-connected devices. Its been more than a year since Dish announced its intention of rolling out an OTT service, and since that time it has struck various deals with media companies.

Spotify announced that as of December 2014, it has 15 million paid subscribers and 60 million active users (including both free and paid). In May 2014, the company announced that it had just reached 10 million paid users...

NBC expanded its TV Everywhere offerings by now offering live streaming of its network on NBC.com to pay TV subscribers. The service went live on 16 December and provides live streaming from all 10 NBC-owned stations.

Tencent, one of China’s leading internet portals, has signed an agreement with HBO to stream the Time Warner-owned network’s TV dramas and movies. Under the deal, Tencent is now the exclusive online distributor of HBO in China.

Spotify announced its financial results for 2013, indicating a 74% increase in revenue to $1173 million from $676 million in 2012. Subscription revenue accounted for $1066 million and advertising revenue made up $107 million.

Earlier this month, U.S. President Barack Obama, a long-time proponent of net neutrality, called on the Federal Communications Committee (FCC) to regulate the internet under “Title II of the Communications Act of 1934”, classifying it as a telecommunications service and applying the same restrictions placed on ‘common carrier’ telecoms services, which are considered to be public utility under the Act. Under the current status quo, broadband internet services are categorised as ‘information services’ meaning that internet service providers are not obliged to offer the same service for everyone, unlike in the case of telephone services or electricity.

Multichoice, the largest pay TV operator in South Africa (its home market) and in Sub-Saharan Africa, is bringing to the market a bunch of new online services and enhanced functionalities for its DStv Explora set-top box. Subscribers to the top-tier DStv Premium package will have the option to buy a DStv WiFi connector for a price of 399 Rand ($36). Using the WiFi connector the subscribers can connect their DStv Explora set-top box to the internet and set decoder recordings remotely at any time though their smart-phones, tablets and PCs.